LogFAQs > #934712122

Good to know I can avoid having my list predicted so long as I give clues so uselessly vague that they can be applied to more maps than I'm going to talk about in this topic. Might need to calibrate my hint giving a little...

The Good

17. Shadow Dragon Final - Chosen By Fate

https://ibb.co/nQwKYP2

First off let me just say that I really love that this game takes the time to point out in the narration that Marth's army split its forces up to storm the castle but Medeus was expecting this, thus explaining why your team starts spread out in an awkward way. A certain game that doesn't bother to let you adjust your deployment order without looking up a guide on how to do it could have benefited from thinking about these things...

Anyway. I know Shadow Dragon is a contentious entry in the series for a variety of reasons that don't need to be rehashed here, but for me, it's a game I'll always have time for. It was the first Fire Emblem game I ever played, and I liked it enough to get hooked on the series. It may be pretty basic in a lot of ways and shows the age of the original at times (notably with how it replicates the enemy composition of the original even though weapon triangle being a thing now makes that a huge balance issue, AKA it makes swords kind of shit) but its maps are mostly pretty fun and I love the forging mechanic it has, even if it is a huge game breaker. And its H5 difficulty is one of the best challenges the series has to offer, and it's this difficulty I'll mainly be thinking of during this write up.

This brings us to the final chapter. You can, of course, warp skip it, although it's not trivial to do without sacrifices unless you reset until you get a crit because Medeus tends to kill anything that he attacks. You can also do some hilarious crit strats with ballisticians to get the boss kill fairly early, though this requires a very expensive forge. If you don't want to do either of these things...oh dear. This map is full of some of the nastiest enemies the series has to offer. In terms of raw stats they may not stand out compared to the high stat games like Awakening or Three Houses, but Shadow Dragon has pretty low growth rates and no late game units with dominant bases (think Laguz royals in Radiant Dawn) to carry you, so you're up against enemies who approach their caps in some stats wielding nasty shit like forged brave weapons with few units that can survive exposure to more than one enemy at a time. Then there's the Swarm Bishops covering large chunks of the map, and perhaps worst of all, the forged Pachyderm Ballisticians. Who even show up as reinforcement! 3-10 range with 40 attack is utterly terrifying relative to your units, and is something you pretty much need to deal with immediately.

Did I mention there's a lot of reinforcements over the course of the map? Because there are. Have fun!

If you choose to play Chosen By Fate the "conventional" way it's utterly insane. You have essentially no leeway on anything and have to make every single move you make as calculated as possible or you'll get someone killed. This might just be the hardest map in all of Fire Emblem if played without some sort of early boss kill strategy. I have to appreciate it for that, especially since Shadow Dragons mechanics lend itself to fun challenges - hit rates are high for both you and the enemy, making it easy to predict the outcome of every round of combat, and there's very little in the way of the kind of trickery or gimmicks that the games with skills can offer. It's just a straight forward Fire Emblem map with brutal enemies you have to deal with. Well, I say "have to" but as noted multiple times, you *can* always cheese it, which I actually don't mind! This map not being cheeseable would honestly be a bad thing, it's such a difficulty spike that it might be unreasonable to expect someone to have to deal with it if they didn't want to.

And on a more general note, I really enjoy the atmosphere of this map. The much darker colour scheme than any of the other indoor maps and slow, sinister music really make it feel like a dramatic final battle, and a fitting end to a game I always enjoy playing.

Up next: A map that can throw some nasty shit at you or be beaten on turn 1...though the process to do so is far from simple!

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Meow!